Image via Wikipedia

The Pension Play Pen is rather proud of itself for getting its band on stage at the 100 Club tonight. We’re performing a 30 minute set for Pension Rocks and it’s going to be brilliant.

It shows what can be done when you get a cohesive group of like-minded individuals together with a positive attitude.

Unlike any other of the fourteen bands playing the three nights, the Racket of the Lambs is formed of people who by an large had never met a month ago. The eight of us work for eight different companies, do differing jobs and are only connected by working in pensions and having a passion for musical fun.

A lot of people moan about Linkedin being a waste of time, but we are proof positive that with a bit of care, we can  use it  for more than getting ourselves a job.

To all coming tonight, thanks for your support. To all those who haven’t joined the Pension Play Pen but are reading this..

GET IN THERE!

We are the Play Pen -

Image via Wikipedia

the famous Play Pen

We are the Play Pen – the famous Play Pen  (repeat ad nauseam)

This is also the case when advice is purchased by a  VAT registered entity, typically a company. The difference for VAT registered companies is they can claim back the VAT effectively making free standing advice VAT free.

Employer”s who purchase advice on behalf of employees (for instance to help them undrstand their employee benefits) not  only get the VAT exemption but they also can provide this (within limits ) as a tax-free benefit in kind with no P11D implications.

It is surprising, good advice being a commodity in great demand, that employers are not taking greater advantage of such a tax-advantaged benefit. It is also surprising that many IFAs are missing out on the opportunities to provide workplace advisory work using the employer as both introducer and sponsor.

Here’s Paul’s excellent article.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with financial advisers selling financial products.

Indeed, as Winston Churchill maintained, the selling of life assurance is the noblest of professions, protecting families from the risk of disaster.

But this can only be true if sales are the consequence of advice, and not the reason for it. Yet new rules designed to ensure that financial advisers are truly independent seem to be biased in favour of sales – leaving the door open to future mis-selling scandals.

The Treasury has recently explained to financial advisers what tax breaks we can expect next year when the Retail Distribution Review (RDR) takes effect. Put simply – advisers will receive a tax break on VAT only if they make a sale. If not, the VAT charge will add 20 per cent to the client’s bill. So clients who buy products, pay less for advice than those who don’t.

Since starting my own independent financial advisory firm, I, along with many of my peers, have tried to forge a profession to equal that of lawyers and accountants. We have long campaigned for commission-based services to be abolished in favour of fee-based practices, and the regulator’s ban on commission, part of RDR, is commendable.

But I believe the Financial Services Authority’s (FSA) approach to raising standards is one of the biggest blocks to achieving the desired objective, and the tax treatment of product sales typifies the problem.

The FSA still views the role of the independent financial adviser as a product seller; indeed it still talks about monitoring product sales. This perpetuates a gross misunderstanding of what our profession is all about.

Before making any sales, advisers should offer a free first meeting to ascertain a client’s requirements. Future fees should be disclosed, as a statutory obligation, but they should relate to the individual client’s needs, not the products on offer.

A proper understanding of the client should be achieved – what the FSA itself calls “knowing your client” – and a long-term relationship can begin. Our chartered financial planners are skilled professionals, but without fully understanding the client’s desires, plans and objectives, any resulting advice would be flawed.

The advice process is not solely about selling. It is about providing solutions, which may or may not include financial products, but may also result in tax planning and recommendations about how financial affairs are arranged, for example through trusts and effective will writing.

If people know they are dealing with a salesperson, they can be alerted to the fact that it is his or her job to sell products and make a profit for the firm. But if an individual wants advice, they should have access to a skilled professional who places their interests before the profits available on commission or a fee.

Only when the process of advice is separated from sales in the minds of regulators and consumer advice bodies, will clients get the reassurance they need that the course of action recommended is best for them. Until the FSA is limited to dealing with product sales, and a separate body is in place to regulate advice, the mis-selling will continue.

Paul Taylor is founder and managing director of McCarthy Taylor

Related articles

• Don’t tell me what to do – give me advice! (henrytapper.com)
• The ICAEW and FSA accreditation – what does it mean for your firm? (mercia-group.co.uk)

Talk loyalty, talk Terry Skiverton, Yeovil‘s boss who stood down earlier this season to be come #2 boss , preferring to learn under “Sir” Gary Johnson than walk away in a huff. He will become a better manager for the patience he is showing and Yeovil will I hope reward him over time for the loyalty he has and is showing us.

Career loyalty is a scarce commodity. Pensions were set up to reward it and still do, though the high water mark of that reward is past, it’s the loyal few who joined a company 30 or 40 years ago and are retiring from it now who are the big winners.

Few of us have the good fortune of that continuity of employment as employers like employees are quick to throw the platitudes surrounding the phrase “our people are our greatest asset” out of the window, when a strategic target is at stake.

But we all know - inuitively - that the continuity of service exemplified by Ferguson at United but present in every mature company, is what keeps that company on the straight and narrow.

I met a man last night who has served his company 32 years and hopes to serve it another 8. He is a role model for the many who have worked for him over they years and though I haven’t , he is an inspiration for me.

Companies have a nasty habit of judging people by measurables and blaming those who look the easiest target. The measurables in football amount to the last 450 minutes on the pitch, in business to the specific performance targets in place at any one time. Pensions too are judged by snapshots , accounted for on an annual basis, assessed strategically every three years.

I would suggest that football managers, business people and pensions are all tend to be assessed with short-term measures which ignore the soft values of experience and the measure of loyalty.

It would be good if we would allow loyalty to lay its golden eggs not just at Old Trafford but in our businesses and in our pensions. Less meddling with short-term fixes, more strategic planning and patience please.

Related articles

• Yeovil True – win 3-2 – the Glovers are not going down #ytfc (henrytapper.com)
• It’s Darwinism Joey, but not as we know it. (henrytapper.com)
• Johnson returns as Yeovil manager (news.bbc.co.uk)
• Monty Panesar puts spin on England defeat (thesun.co.uk)
• The benefit of a goose (joemartinfitness.com)

I saw Joy Division once, supporting the Buzzcocks at the Village Bowl in Bournemouth .

They played “24 hours”, the first time I’d heard it – I think the gig pre-dated the release of Closer.

I still speak about the band as if everyone knows everything about them. As a 17 year old it seemed impossible that anyone could feel any other way than blown away by this song, At 50 I feel I am 17 when I listen to it.

Before we go any further – listen to this amazing clip http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OOEM9SuDFZc

This is a recording made for John Peel’s show and while it may not have the production values of Closer, it has a live feel that still gives me a proxy for that sweaty night in Bournemouth and a moment when love death and the most intense experience of life were soldered together.

Looking back, I see just how powerful these lyrics are, not so much for  sense- which while suggested is latent rather than obvious, but for the form of each quatrain (four line verse).

- the curfew tolls the knell of parting day

These are the opening words of Grey’s Elegy written in a country churchyard, one of the most profound formal works in the English language, its profundity is latent - in it’s restraint.

Ian Curtis , who wrote the words to this song, is also writing an elegy, it is not  not an elegy to a mute inglorious Milton, it is an elegy to himself, to the what might have been to him and his relationship with his wife and daughter.

It shares with Grey’s elegy a tautness of language and of rhythm that accurately engenders the precise mood of the moment. Grey’s elegy is a meditation  over  a moment in time, Curtis’ is a savage scream for help, but both are powered by the structure of the lines and the verses.

One of the problems of writing in English is the tendency to get overwhelmed by iambs- the iambic pentameter goes de der de der de der de der de der

The curfew tolls the knell of passing day

Here’s Curtis’ opening line

So this is permanent , love’s shattered pride

Curtis  splits his line but it is basically an iambic pentameter, its meter is the meter of Grey’s elegy but here Curtis’s singing voice takes over. Curtis sings  a dactyl in the opening half of the line and returns the line to the iambic in the second half.  I doubt he thought of it in those terms but once listened to, it’s impossible to be mesmerised by the pattern of the cadences which exactly fit the mood and sense of the line. The bitter irony of its opening half gives way to a baleful resignation of the second. Anger and resignation caught in two brilliantly suggestive half-lines.

This intuitive technique does not spring from a textbook, it seems to come from a depth of feeling within Curtis. Watching Lucien Freud painting on the TV on Saturday night I sensed that the realism that springs from the fleshtones of his nudes is not learned but arrived at from a deep examination of all possibilities and the arrival at the inevitable expression , the expression that absolutely conveys the truth of the moment.

The artistry of 24 hours rests in the constant modulation within the half lines of cadences, half rhymes and full rhymes but at no time does Curtis let go of the formal structure of the iambic pentameter.

Even though we can hear his heart breaking in lines as deep as this

Deep in the heart of where sympathy held sway,

The line breaks after the “of”, an unatural break that unsettles the sense of the line. There are resonances here but the line, as I mentioned before is suggestive, latent, pregnant – it does not display its meaning. I’ve been trying to make sense of that “of” – “of what”? “of darkness, “of the heart?”, it’s none of these- there is nothing there- that’s what is so scary (and brilliant) in this line and why (for me) it’s the standout line of the song.

I think 24 hours is one of the best things produced in Britain since the war. Here are the words as I hear them- I don’t know if they are definitively put down and whether there are mistakes in my hearing. The man who wrote them died soon after. He is known for his epitaph “love will tear us apart” but this elegy is his true tombstone. Whether there was therapy we or he will never know, for those of us lucky enough go to his dark place, the horror is only imagined.

So this is permanent,love’s shattered pride

What once was innocence, turned on its side.
Grey cloud hangs over me, mark every move,
Deep in the memory, of what once was love.

Oh how I realised how I wanted time,
Put into perspective, tried so hard to find,
Just for one moment, thought I’d found my way.
Destiny unfolded, I watched it slip away.

Excessive flashpoints, beyond all reach,
Solitary demands for all I’d like to keep.
Let’s take a ride out, see what we can find,
A valueless collection of hopes and past desires.

I never realised the lengths I’d have to go,
All the darkest corners of a sense I didn’t know.
Just for one moment, I heard somebody call,
Looked beyond the day in hand, there’s nothing there at all.

Now that I’ve realised how it’s all gone wrong,
Gotta find some therapy, this treatment takes too long.
Deep in the heart of where sympathy held sway,
Gotta find my destiny, before it gets too late.

Related articles

• teaching iambic pentameter (lotusandbee.com)

Here’s how to turn a car journey with kids into a fun and memorable happening.

You will need

At least one spoilt savvy kid with a smartphone – not hard to find these days

The phone to be loaded with the Foursquare app.

An adult refereeing.

Ideally you will have a number of spoilt brats in the back of the car who all have access to an i-phone with the full camera kit, decent 3G connection and capacity to use the thing.

The rules, all contestants are tasked with increasing their foursquare score over the course of the journey. The referee takes scores at outset and at the destination and is the sole judge whose word is final.

All check-ins need to have a photo accompanying. If the photo does not give clear evidence that the object in question has been spied, it is invalid and is deducted from the final score.

For those who don’t know Foursquare, it works like this. Your phone is linked by GPS to your location and some smart software from the Foursquare people means that local points of interest, typically petrol stations, KFC, Stonehenge, a traffic jam are identified as points you can check in. Some of these check-ins earn you lots of points , some are duds. You get all kind of extra points if you become mayor of a place (because you’ve been there often) or because you are the first of your friends to go somewhere.

I’ve played this game in the car a number of times. It is not advisable to do so when you ar driving as you will almost certainly crash while taking a photo as you drive. Otherwise it is a harmless way of passing the time and leaves at the end a photographic trail of what you’ve seen on the way.

There are many other ways to use Foursquare such as to check in at a football match along with half of the people in your stand (all of whom are Foursquare fans because we all support Yeovil and we are all social media nutters).

You compete in Foursquare leagues against your friends, there is much cheating in these leagues as unlike “i-hone spy” there is no referee and you can be on a Thorpe park rollercoaster one minute and walking through a Forest 30 seconds later. If there are no photos you can make it up as you go along and become a complete Walter Mitty.

But i-phone spy is deffo the business if you want to turn a car journey into a memorable event.

Foursquare -yeah!

Related articles

• Checking In: Which App Should I Use (mycricket.com)
• Foursquare Also Trying To Kill Egyptian Dissidents (uncrunched.com)
• News: Foursquare brings Explore to iPhone (ilounge.com)
• Checking Out of Foursquare (davidbinkowski.com)
• Save Places You Find Online To Your Foursquare To-Do List (readwriteweb.com)
• Tag Your Foursquare Check-Ins with #mom to Let ‘Em Know You Got There Safely (lifehacker.com)
• Send Automated Phone Calls To Your Mom When You Checkin Foursquare (madrasgeek.com)
• I don’t get it : FourSquare (gadeblazz.com)
• Using Foursquare for Your Local Business (socialmediatoday.com)

This from the normally readable Booznews

This year’s fact-based shopper marketing study, prepared in partnership with Shopper Sciences and the Grocery Manufacturers Association, reveals, among other findings, that leading CPG manufacturers and retailers are increasingly adopting a solutions-based approach to amplify the impact of their shopper marketing investments.

I will ask you to enquire no further into this study – as if you would!

The language we use shapes the response we get- in this case “delete”. The delete button on my computer is sticky with use.

Defensive language, of which the quote is an example always does that to me. If people need to use acronyms and jargon and long sentence and avoid the everyday cadences of speech, then they are on the back foot. Like a lion I sense fear and with the awesome “delete” button, dispatch them to the netherworld of “trash”. So easily done.

Sadly I am only one of many thousands who received booznews this morning, no doubt some will have clicked the link to find out more of the study, prepared to pull aside the heavy vegetation to get to the clearing in the jungle in which some deep truth lies.

Defensive language aims to bamboozle with verbal bamboo. The trick is to make you think, through the periphrastic phraseology, that there is something behind this wall of verbiage/herbage/garbage.

My old English teacher, Geoffrey Hill , used to start his nine O’clock lectures (at which I and two or three others would attend)  with this..

“Worn down as I am by the ineluctable modality of existence..” .

It was a precursor to his mesmerizing lectures that never for the next hour used  cliche or jargon. It was a warning of what might have come had he unloaded the toxic armoury of polysyllables he had at his disposal.

But his wry smile as he desisted told us that we had nothing to fear.

Vince Franklin and Mark Scantlebury who run Quietroom, coach me on how to keep my language simple. Hopefully they will be coaching more than me and extend their good words to my colleagues.

If , like Geoffrey Hill, we are aware of the ineluctable moronity of verbal bamboo of the type this blog began with, then we too can move on. If however we have no awareness, we become the target of the delete button and in this case, of Tapper’s scorn.

Have a cracking Friday, have a cracking weekend and thanks for all the kind words about my blog this week. Last week some people reported seeing foul words on this blog- if you see them, please send the link to henry.h.tapper@gmail.com. Obscenities are worse than jargon, they create offence and destroy reputations.

There is a big step between defensive language (to be laughed at) and offensive language (to be stopped).

Related articles

• Carol Ann Duffy and Geoffrey Hill: truly poetic heavyweights | Lemn Sissay (guardian.co.uk)
• Carol Ann Duffy ‘wrong’ about poetry, says Geoffrey Hill (guardian.co.uk)
• Carol Ann Duffy: Poet Laureate compared to Mills & Boon romance writers in stinging attack by rival (dailymail.co.uk)

Apparently, senior strategists within the DWP were as nonplussed as the majority of his audience as Steve called for a return to the pensions culture that fostered the defined benefit culture.

Had the minister not read the GAD report that so conclusively dissed the ACA’s call for CDC?

Did the minister not understand the anarchy that would ensue were companies allowed to run pensions as they wanted to rather than to the gospel of the DWP-tPR-big four and the entire legal industry?

Was the minister aware of the threat that such a move would represent to the livelihoods of those in his own department which were intricately tied up with the current regulatory system?

Worryingly for Sir Humphrey, the minister had left his cage and like a captive canary released to nature, he was chirping away with no regard to ministerial protocols or more importantly the interests of his department.

It’s very rare in Government that we see a minister take such a risk, but then it’s rare that we have a minister that knows what he’s doing.

According to an eminent lawyer I was meeting yesterday, the best thing that Steve Webb could do now is to sack the majority of the pension staff at the DWP, abolish the Pension Regulator, pack his golf clubs into the boot of his car and go on a three year sabbatical. The lawyer in question was of the mind that the best people to come up with a system of collective pensions that worked for the member were in the room in which we sat.

Flattering as this was, I do not think that the offices of a City Law firm are going to spawn a brave new world in pensions. The solutions that the eminent City Lawyer was putting forward, a system of book reserve pensions that put me in mind of a Graham Greene novel, looked as if it might be introduced without the need for primary legislation (eg the DWP lawyers). Other solutions, based on a funded DC system have been temporarily kiboshed by the exasperating DWP pronouncements after the original Bridge Trustees ruling. Unwinding that would , I am told , need help from the people that caused the - the DWP mandarins.

Conspiracy theories abound as you approach the hallowed halls of power. One senses a loss of perspective.

Sitting as a layman in a court of £1000 an hour super-legal-big-wigs, I felt depressed that the interests of the people for whom all this reform is supposed to be in aid of, seemed of no importance to anyone.

As I gazed across the City , 15 floors above the scurrying ants that shimmied down distant pavements, I felt as Steve Webb seems to have done. From where I was sitting, people weren’t in the perspective – except as insects.

To be a big-hearted intelligent person charged with getting pensions right looked a thnkless task. It must be hell to be surrounded by the small minded careerism that I hear about from those who have tried to take on the DWP- read Alan Higham’s blog on getting help for his mother to get a better flavour.

More and more I feel that any solution to the national problems of providing proper pensions to give security to people’s old age does not come from the DWP. But nor does it come from the City. It will come, if it comes at all, by allowing the voices of pension practitioners, of those who understand the nature of members and from the ordinary people who know their minds, to be heard.

I am not talking focus groups here, I’m talking about a genuine consultation between Steve Webb and those people who care more about lasting solutions than short-term profits.

People, like Webb himself, that Beveridge would have been proud of.

Pummeting annuity rates and poor investment returns means thousands cannot afford to stop work.

 

One in 10 of those due to retire this year will delay taking their pension, as a combination of plummeting annuity rates and poor investment returns means thousands cannot afford to stop work.  

Related articles

• Aspirational pensions – popcorn pensions!! (henrytapper.com)
• Define your aspiration. (henrytapper.com)
• Can we have a word Mr Webb? (henrytapper.com)
• The NAPF point the finger at the £1bn annuity scandal (henrytapper.com)
• Pension pots evaporate as annuity rates fall (moneyexpert.com)

Image via Wikipedia

Last night’s 3-2 victory against Wycombe Wanderers lifts the Glovers to 18th in the league, four points out of the relegation zone. Since Gary Johnson’s arrival , and Terry Skiverton‘s retention, the Somerset community based club’s been going  from strength to strength. Read the  ciderspace report here, the BBC report’s on the first link of this paragraph.

The triumph is the greater having been achieved not just against 11 men but aginst the Kettle , surely football’s worst referee.

Apart from this magnificent piece of news, what else have we to contemplate on the football front?

Rangers go into administration in advance of being liquidated by HMRC for cheating us out of our tax.

Suarez has still to apologise for his racist taunts and is no locked in a bitter battle with Quatada and Tevez for the title “Britain’s least wanted man”

The nation breathes a sigh of relief that its next football manager can’t be a tax cheat because he can’t read, write or even tweet.

Against the misery that surrounds the upper echelons of our football leagues and the antics of the FA, the behaviour of our club, its players, its supporters and its management is a beacon of happiness.

These are the words of Ryan Dickson as he tweeted off back to Southampton after his all too brief loan spell;-

Wish yeovil all the best for rest of season really enjoyed my time there! Community based football club that I’m sure will stay up! #Ytfc

Spot on; Yeovil are a club where the distinctions between fans and players merge. It’s true that we could run our club cheaper than Man City run Tevez and if we sold our club, we probably couldn’t buy Tevez’ boots – money means nothing.

I’m writing this to say thanks to all the fans who tweet and blog the news of Gary Johnson’s Green and White army to me. Last night I could and should have been at the game and I  regret being so in love with the missus that I stayed in and spent Valentine’s night with her, pretending to watch a film, eyes stuck to the #ytfc twitterfeed.

Go on Olly, Go on my boy, Go on!

Yeovil True!

Related articles

• Better York than Yeovil - #ytfc ousted by the Cod Army (henrytapper.com)
• Yeovil True ; come on #ytfc (henrytapper.com)
• What football’s all about : Yeovil V Charlton (henrytapper.com)
• What is better than sport- nothing (well apart from one thing) (henrytapper.com)
• Gary Johnson returns to Yeovil for second spell as manager (independent.co.uk)
• It’s Darwinism Joey, but not as we know it. (henrytapper.com)
• Gary Johnson will find it tough bringing happy days back to Yeovil | John Ashdown (guardian.co.uk)
• Johnson returns as Yeovil manager (news.bbc.co.uk)
• Johnson rules out Yeovil return (skysports.com)
• Johnson returns as Yeovil manager (news.bbc.co.uk)
• Musical Yeovil Town best man’s speech becomes YouTube hit (offthepost.info)
• Yeovil capture Watford goalkeeper (news.bbc.co.uk)

There is nothing new about the search for a third way, indeed it is the pensions equivalent of the North West Passage. What is new about Webb’s thinking is that he is daring to think about a pension where the covenent is based on hope or as the cynical would put it “thin air”.

There is no meat on the bones. I hope that that is on purpose. It is for us, those who care enough about retirement issues to blog and read blogs to dream up a non guaranteed pension that can provide sufficient security for people to consider ist aspirations credible but is not so expensive to guarantee that it attracts no employers to sponsor it.

May I be one of the first to put forward by DA model, there is nothing I would like more than to look back in a few years with DA flourishing and laugh at myself for my naivety in suggesting such a solution but without a windmill at which to tilt, those cleverer than me may not bother to enter the lists.

I see DA schemes as workplace arrangements, offered by large companies or on a multi-employer basis similar to the new breed of mastertrusts. I see them as collective vehicles that benefit from the old-fashioned virtues of mutuality - trust, economies of scale and collective risk pooling. Those are the general features but for them to work I’m suggesting some underlying features which underpin them all.

First and foremost a credible “aspirational” pension needs to operate on a defined contribution basis. By that I mean that the contributions must be defined at outset and only adjusted with the blessing of all participants. This cannot be a variable cost arrangement with the balance of costs falling to any one party (member,sponsor or tax-payer).

Secondly, the benefits of such an arrangement need to be set at outset but adjusted over time on an equitable basis. The principle of equity in pensions is long-established and underpinned the distribution of with-profits funds. Equity can only be maintained by the highest standards of prudential governance and where we need rules it is around the assumptions made before and during the operation of a DA pension and those rules need to be agreed by all parties and only adjusted on the same basis.

Thirdly the granting of a licence to establish and run one of these Defined Aspiration pensions must require some serious hoop-jumping. The Pension Regulator defined what made for good DC outcomes; namely

1. The right level of contributions (to match the benefit aspirations)
2. The right investment strategy (to optimise the chances of meeting the targeted benefits)
3. Security of assets – not so important in insured DC but dead important here where a single asset pool may be maintained in a segregated fund
4. Proper administration - the entitlement of  members to the right level of benefits will depend on many variables and both the investment administration and record keeping will be complex
5. Value for money - any costs incurred are justified by the benefits they bring
6. Converting pension savings into retirement income needs to be smooth and efficient.

Schemes that can prove to have nailed all six requirements and can demonstrate that they have a process of ongoing governance to ensure they continue to do so, should be allowed to operate under what in the USA (under ERISA) are called safe harbour conditions.

Put simply, the regulation of DA pensions needs to be light touch and those who set them up, sponsor them and manage them need to feel they can get on with doing so without needing to account for their pensions annually on a mark to market basis, pay PPF levies and employ an army of lawyers to guide them through a minefield of penal regulations.

Fourthly, how schemes go about achieving their aims should be up to them. There will be schemes which offer no investment choice and those that allow people to accumulate pension savings - their way. I assume that the vast majority of people will invest in a consensus default fund where decisions are taken for them but critically, defined aspirations will also enable pensions to be paid by the scheme rather than through annuities, this assumes of course that the principles of collective pooling apply at retirement but why shouldn’t they?

Fifthly, there needs to be a huge effort made to get people who join these DA schemes to understand the risks of things going wrong. They are of course the same risks as they are already facing but whereas previously people knew they were on their own, in collective arrangements

Sixthly there needs to be a paradigmatic mindshift among those working in the pensions industry away from satisfying regulation and towards meeting our customer needs. To use my parlance, we need to make people happy about their retirement. That means that we need to approach these pensions with an enthusiasm that I call “popcorn pensions”. This need not be frivolous though it should be fun. Achieving what we aspire to will not be easy but it should be approached and achieved with a sense of delight conspicuously absent from most pension discussions to date!